Anatoly Liberman

Ache, akimbo, and askance are words whose etymology has not been discovered despite numerous attempts to trace their initial form and country of origin. By contrast, the derivation of aloof is known, but it is instructive to watch researchers’ groping in the dark for more than two centuries and sometimes even now looking for a better solution. The etymologies offered below are entries in my prospective dictionary of English etymology. Each of them opens with an abstract of its own.

“My life in etymology” is a story of a new etymological dictionary of English. The essay tells of how the project began and developed and how work on the dictionary engulfed its originator and became the culmination of his career in philology.

n 2006 Thomas O. Lambdin brought out An Introduction to the Gothic Language. Every lesson is followed by vocabulary notes that include etymologies. Most of them were borrowed from well-known dictionaries, but a few are new. The paper contains comments on those etymologies.

Now that printed books are being replaced by online materials, it is especially important to agree on the format of the etymological dictionary of the future. It seems expedient to discontinue the publication of dictionaries that contain minimal or no new information, for the public already has more than enough of them. The profession needs exhaustive (ideally annotated) bibliographies of everything ever published on the origin of every word in the language under study. Of great use can be thematic etymological dictionaries, such as dictionaries of presumably native words in a given language, of borrowings, of slang, of regional words, etc. Only the languages that have never been the object of sustained etymological research require general dictionaries of the type once produced by Skeat, Kluge, and their peers.